B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery Read Free

Bookmobile, its air horn blaring as if
it were a fogbound freighter crossing the Columbia River bar.
    As Darrow stared
with dropped jaw the big bus ground to a halt 10 feet away. Clouds of steam
fogged its windows.
    The front door
popped open and Hester McGarrigle, her face red as a beet, stumbled to the
pavement.
    Seeing Darrow,
she started to speak, but all that came out was a squeak. Her eyes rolled back
in her head and she slumped in a faint just as Nate Darrow rushed forward to
catch her.
    “Oh, Ms.
McGarrigle, we really need to stop meeting this way,” he said under his breath
as he carried Hester to the First Aid tent.

 
    Chapter 2
     
     
    Tuesday, June 11
     
    Sunday and
Monday were the bookmobile crew’s customary days off, so there was plenty of
time to recover from the heat. This morning, Pim was hot under the collar for a
different reason.
    “Why do they
have to change our route? It was perfectly fine just as it was, and anytime
they change it to make things more ‘efficient’ ” – she curled her stubby
fingers in air quotes – “it just confuses the patrons and we show up at stops
with nobody there!”
    “And it complicates
my job because I don’t know who’s going to show up at a new stop and what they
might like to read,” Hester added. Unlike a regular library, the bookmobile
catered to specific patrons on its different runs. Sometimes that meant
stocking up on romances and westerns, or filling the shelves with movie-star
biographies. Today Hester had tried to shelve a broader selection, including
some young-adult novels in hopes of snagging a teen reader or two. “I can
always dream!” she told Pim.
    The librarian
suspected her driver’s ire had to do with more than just the reading public,
however. The change of stops also meant Madame Pim wouldn’t get to have lunch
at the Onion-Aire burger stand by the Skyline bookmobile stop every Tuesday,
Hester mused, suppressing a smile.
     The Onion-Aire’s
regular burgers came with two hefty beef patties, and Pim’s normal order was for
an extra patty on top of that. The café had a standing challenge that if you
ordered a burger with four patties – a Walla Walla Whomper – and finished it in
one sitting, they’d give you another free. It was one of Pim’s long-standing
ambitions.
    “But then she’d
explode,” Hester said to herself.
    “What’s that you
say?” Pim asked.
    “Oh!” Hester
looked up as Pim parked at the Skyline stop at 9 a.m., the new scheduled time
for the hilltop lookout, which today was wrapped in thick fog. “Uh, I was just thanking
our lucky stars this old bus didn’t explode coming up the hill. After it got so
overheated in the parade.”
    “Yeah, well, Bob
Newall said he spent all day yesterday flushing out the radiator; he
practically flooded the bookmobile barn,” Pim said, referring to the
long-suffering mechanic who kept Portland’s Mobile Library Unit chugging along.
“And I didn’t waste my days off. It gave me time to catch up on the Rose
Medallion clues. Me and Millie Eubanks from the motor pool – you know that gal
who almost got on ‘Jeopardy’? – we’re putting our heads together and I think we
have a chance at it. And it comes with big bucks this time, did you hear?”
    The Rose
Medallion search was a longstanding, highly popular part of Rose Festival.
Every June, a small bronze medallion about the size of an Olympic medal and
engraved with a rosebud was hidden “in plain sight,” as contest organizers put
it, somewhere around Portland. Clues to its whereabouts were published each
morning in The Oregonian newspaper, starting out very vaguely and
getting more obvious as the week wore on. Whoever was first to find the
medallion won all sorts of donated prizes.
    This year, in
celebration of its 50 th year in business, a local manufacturer of
sport runners, Zeus Shoes, had put up $50,000 cash, stoking interest to a
fevered pitch.
    “That would sure
put a nice bump in the double-wide